Developing Writing Skills in Spanish and the supplemental Guia del profesor are a highly recommended text and companion website for advanced undergraduate students, graduate level seminars, and are commendable reference resources for professional educators. Instructors will have an abundance of authentic reading materials readily available to them to develop their students' proficiency in writing skill development. Equally important are the integration and correlation of reading, and developing writing skills through the use of these companion resources in the Spanish language. - Donna M. Wilson, University of Maryland, University College, USA in Hispania March 2013
Developing Writing Skills in Spanish is an extremely versatile book based on pedagogically sound principles. It introduces readers to a rich variety of registers, which combined with examples from contemporary sources, literary as well as non-literary, from Spain and Spanish America, help the learner to develop a feel for style and register variation. In addition, its user-friendly, carefully organized activities provide plenty of opportunity for practice and review of vocabulary, syntactic structures, and idiomatic usage. Its flexible structure makes it eminently adaptable to a variety of courses, enabling instructors to either proceed from one chapter to the next or to pick and choose according to the needs of courses for specific purposes. Finally, the availability of answers to the exercises makes the book eminently useable for independent study. - Milton Azevedo, University of California, USA
I enjoyed this very much. This is a really substantial examination of writing in Spanish, sensibly broken down to help the reasonably advanced learner. It should help those with a good knowledge of Spanish to improve their writing skills considerably. What I like about it most is the variety and quality of the authentic examples of writing, often penned by very good authors. Each area is dealt with in detail and through imaginative and engaging exercises. There's a wealth of detail much of which will be useful for reference purposes as well as for Spanish language learning courses.- Jonathan Thacker, University of Oxford, UK
This textbook is most welcome, for it supports our department's goal of having student majors achieve advanced to superior writing proficiency in Spanish. The authors have identified and provided the kind of instruction and support students need at the advanced level to cultivate their rhetorical sense while continuing to develop their vocabulary, as well as their understanding of the subtleties of aspect, mode and syntax in Spanish. Engaging and carefully crafted learning activities help students use their critical reading skills to improve their writing skills. Students will find the exercises fostering the acquisition of an advanced critical lexicon and specific rhetorical strategies to be most valuable. Professors will appreciate the emphasis on planning, revising, and proofreading one's essay, as well as the nuts and bolts advice on the use of the dictionary, punctuation, accentuation and orthography in Spanish. ! Gracias y enhorabuena! - Alice J. Poust, Bucknell University, USA
The distinctive features of this resource are the clarity of its explanations and structure and the wide variety and quality of the activities... Developing Writing Skills in Spanish is a very versatile resource. It could be used as a classroom textbook in a course devoted to writing skills, or its individual chapters or activities could help complement any general language course. The fact that answers are included at the end makes the book a good resource for self-study too. The flexibility of its structure makes it easy to pick and choose individual activities and chapters in an order different from the one presented in the book. This well thought-out and motivating resource will be very useful in helping advanced students to achieve writing proficiency and it should therefore have an important role to play in Spanish courses for students of Spanish in higher education. - Nuria Lopez, Newcastle University, UK in Vida Hispanica, autumn 2012
'As teachers of advanced Spanish language courses at university level, we have been looking forward to the publication of this vlume, and it does not disappoint. This is an excellent handbook for developing writing skills in Spanish: carefully devised and structured, rigorously compiled, clearly written and pedagogically very sound. It presents a rich selection of texts and examples from a wide range of genres, including original material as well as articles and essays from notable Hispanic authors, aimed at developing reading comprehension and analytical skills together with writing competance... this is a comprehensive and practical handbook that will certainly helpf students become more competent writers in Spanish. The leevl of detail and clarity of explanations are commendable. It is a most welcome and needed volume that fills with great success a substantial gap in the Spanish language materials available to advanced learners.' - BSS
This is an excellent handbook for developing writing skills in Spanish: carefully devised and structured, rigorously compiled, clearly written and pedagogically very sound. It presents a rich selection of texts and examples from a wide range of genres, including original material as well as articles and essays from notable Hispanic authors, aimed at developing reading comprehension and analytical skills together with writing competence.The level of detail and clarity ofexplanations are commendable. It is a most welcome and needed volume that fills with great success a substantial gap in the Spanish language materials available to advanced learners. -Angeles Carreres and Maria Noriega-Sanchez, University of Cambridge
